Analysis of Front Side Halo CMEs and Their Solar Source Active Region and Flare Ribbon Properties

Abstract

Halo coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun are the subset of CMEs, which are more energetic than the normal CMEs. Only the more energetic CMEs are observable in white-light coronagraphs when they are traveling along the line of sight (LOS) and a CME is better observed when it is traveling perpendicularly to the LOS. We investigated the flare associated front side halo CMEs, their active regions (ARs) and flare ribbon properties observed during the period of 2010 – 2016 in Solar Cycle 24. The aim of this study is to investigate the statistical relationship between the kinematic properties of CMEs and their source active region and flare ribbon properties. The properties of the solar source region (sunspot classification according to Hale and McIntosh, sunspot area, and the number of spots) and flare ribbons (total unsigned magnetic flux, total unsigned reconnection flux, active region area, and ribbon area) are obtained for the selected events and analyzed to find the dependence of the halo CME properties (linear speed, kinetic energy, space speed, and mass) on the source region characteristics. From the preliminary analysis, 13% of halo CMEs are found to be associated with X-class flares, 52% with M-class flares, and 35% with C-class flares. It is found that many events (45/60) were produced by \(\upbeta \upgamma \updelta \) and \(\upbeta \upgamma \) Hale-type sunspot groups and Ekc/Dkc/Fkc McIntosh sunspot classes, which implies a degree of complexity of the involved sunspots. We found moderate correlations between the active region properties and CME properties, but strong correlation between the flare ribbons and CME properties. This result indicates that the kinematics of CMEs are determined by the role of magnetic reconnection and the flux related to it. We estimated the synthetic CME mass (using a synthetic CME generated based on a full ice-cream cone structure proposed recently by Na et al., Astrophys. J. 906, 46, 2021). It is demonstrated that the estimated mass of halo CMEs is 1.44 times (without occulted area) and 2 times (with occulted area) that of the observed CME mass. Further, the relations between the halo CME synthetic mass with the active region and flare ribbon properties have been obtained.